STOP writing self serving blog posts. Nobody wants to read them!
Very often businesses struggle to come up with content for their blog and despite good intentions slip into sales mode and, very often, pump out “advertorial” type content rather than valuable blog posts. Unsurprisingly these posts are rarely shared online and generate little to no ROI.
Talk to any good marketer and they are likely to tell you to start with your customer or client and work backwards. So it always amazes me how little some business owners appear to know about their target audience needs, interests and wants. Very often…

We all love creative, visual images and what better than images that educate with informative topics and content. The ideal way to display this content is by using infographics that can be displayed on your website and easily shared.
What is an Infographic?
An Infographic is a way of taking complex and detailed information and presenting it in a visually pleasing way that is easy to assimilate and share online. Infographics are creative, colourful and fun and capture awareness of the salient points of a topic, creating an opportunity for increased traffic to your website.

Are you a business professional that knows you need to blog, but quite frankly don’t have the time? Or maybe you are the business professional that that struggles to write content– after all you’re a business person not a journalist.
Sadly, you guys are the experts in your field and, very often, it is your knowledge and opinion that an existing and/or potential customer wants to hear. So getting your administration or even marketing team to produce bland and sometimes even confused content isn’t going to cut it with your target audience.
Hmmm….sounds like a bit of a catch 22 to…

It’s all about working smart when it comes to Content Marketing.
As a business, you have to make decisions on:
The type of Content Marketing for your business requirements
The best way to squeeze these requirements out of your budget
How best to strategize and implement your content marketing
How to analyse and determine best practice to gain long, term value
and: THE BIG ONE
What you want to tangibly ACHIEVE with your content marketing efforts.
When you think about all of the…

This week we look at the amazing SlideShare.net. Quite frankly I could write a book here as there is so much to say, but for now you will have to put up with a brief overview.
What is SlideShare?
Acquired by LinkedIn in March 2012 – SlideShare is a platform that allows you upload and share your presentations and content effortlessly.
It is in itself a social network and a place businesses often overlook when trying to get their content seen.
SlideShare is a free platform that not only allows you move your presentations online, but also gives…

I tend to skim through content and let my brain make a decision as to whether it is intriguing and valuable enough to read in more detail now or to bookmark, maybe with Pocket, for later consumption. This decision depends on many factors; my ability at that moment to absorb the substance, the time factor and whether the visual look, with formatting and blog post images, is appealing and enables ease of read.
Everyone has their own criteria in making this decision, yet most will agree that the placement of images can make or break a blog post….

This week I am very much blowing my trumpet for the brilliant Buffer.
Not only does Buffer have one of the best social media management and scheduling tools on the planet and according to the Social Media Examiner the best Social Media blog on the web, but they have just released a brilliant FREE tool that can only be described as Canva on Speed.
What is Buffer’s Pablo?

You’ve set up your sparkly new business and, with bursting enthusiasm, you start to use word of mouth to spread the word with friends, family and acquaintances. The general reply after the perfunctory congratulations is ‘you definitely need a website’.
You decide they are right (which they are) and you set about creating a site that is filled with compelling descriptions of your product with attractive pictures in between and you sit back and smile and know that this part of your work is complete.
It isn’t
Take a look at your website again.
It looks great, has fantastic text but does it…

I nearly fell victim to a Blogging “No No” this week. One of the key ingredients to a successful blog is consistency. Very often companies start off like a blogging machine and soon realize that they don’t have the time and/or resources to keep up posting at such a pace. In fact so much so that some companies go from frequent to retired blogger. An out of date blog sends out a poor message to your audience.
So what is my point? This week has been an incredibly busy one here at Content Plan and I was in serious danger…

Video, as a content marketing tool, has seen phenomenal growth over the last while, with Facebook and now Twitter embracing this popularity and facilitating its use with prominence on their platforms. The value of video is immense as it creates instant visual attention in a world where online content gets more and more crowded.
We all want to be entertained and, whilst being entertained, we all want to learn and take something from a type of content that resonates. I watch video to gain clarity, be inspired, learn new concepts and as a tutorial tool to understand the how and…